Building a Nexenta CE Machine

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Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Finally got around to provision some space on my ESXi box for a Nexenta Community Edition installation. Any tips for this in ESXi 5.0? Thinking I may do some how-to's on the main site... maybe with video (I am switching YouTube channels and having a film maker actually make a me an intro.)

Anyway, if anyone has thoughts on this I'd greatly appreciate hearing them.

PS gea... I also have an OI + Napp-it VM. Going to do more there. Thinking I may make a ZFS how-to/ tip every Wednesday type cadence.
 

odditory

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Dec 23, 2010
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First topic for a ZFS tip should be spin down how-to. I will send the step by step.

Up until more recently nobody was really doing it and last time I tested OI+nappit there wasn't a known way to spin down pool since it's not part of the zfs spec but meantime there's a method that works and which gea is aware of.

By the way doesn't nexenta ce have a limitation of 20tb or something
 
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Patrick

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Nexenta CE is 18TB usable capacity. Not great but three RAID-Z arrays with four 2TB disks each not including L2ARC.
 

mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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On the LSI9260 series RAID controllers, if you grab SUN/Oracle Firmware 12.12.0-0048 then you have support for spindown of all Drives, be they active, hot spare, or not configured.
This is the only firmware that I know of that does Active drive spin down (when idle for x minutes)

Then you have Hardware spin down, no need to fiddle with anything as it's just done.
I'll probably go to this FW when my 6x HDD's turn up.
Pity the newer SUN/Oracle FW does not support active spin down :(

I have the FW inside the FW updates I keep for the SAS2108 series over here

Chances are that the above is not relevant to ZFS users who probably won't be using SAS2108 controllers.
But you have the info all the same.
 
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gea

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Dec 31, 2010
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-NexentaStor Community edition is limited to 18 TB and Production use is not allowed
http://www.nexentastor.org/projects/site/wiki/CommunityEdition

-There are also problems with the VMware vmxnet3 driver on CE edition (offers better performance)
http://www.nexentastor.org/boards/1/topics/6970#message-7509

-NexentaStor CE 3.1 is based on quite old OpenSolaris Build 134 with some patches and it is end of live.
The successor NexentaStor 4 is on the way and awaited the next weeks
(The new free base OS Illumian, sucessor of NexentaCore is already available. Illumian is based on
current Illumos, similar to OpenIndiana with same apps but with Debian like packaging like apt-get install
instead of pkg install in OI)

I would wait for NexentaStor4 CE or do tests with Illumian (=mostly NexentaStor4 without usage restrictions, without GUI and commercial plugins and of course without support)


about spin down
It is working with Nexenta/OI on a per disk base if you disable fmd (fault management service to check disk health)
It is not working on Solaris 11

about spin down with hardware-raid and ZFS
i would not do. You will loose the self healing feature of ZFS, controller-independant pools and money
and you will need battery packs to overcome the write hole problem on Raid5/6
 
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Patrick

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OK gea_ you convinced me. Will start the OI/ Illumian version with napp-it.